Artist: Lo Moon
Album: I Wish You Way More Than Luck
Year: 2024
Grade: B
In Brief: Six years out from their rather sleepy debut, it’s finally starting to feel like Lo Moon is really gelling as a band, still proudly wearing their 80s influences on their sleeve, but finding a way forward with that as a starting point rather than just coasting on pure nostalgic vibes. I Wish You May More than Luck may not push a ton of musical boundaries, but it has both variety and cohesion, elements that were respectively lacking on their first and second albums. Matt Lowell may prefer a controlled croon to a show-stopping wail, but he’s becoming more proficient as a songwriter, actually capable of making me feel a variety of moods beyond just “Hmmm, that’s vaguely pretty in a melancholy sort of way”. It’s not quite up to par with the band’s monolithic influences, but it’s a vast improvement over what came before.
I think Lo Moon has finally made the transition from “Band I want to like that keeps letting me down” to “Band I actually like”. It’s been a bit of a rough start for them, in my opinion – they started strong in 2016 with their debut single “Loveless”, a slow-burning but captivating ballad based around a distinctive drum loop that wound up sounding like nothing else on their 2018 self-titled LP, most of which was long on 80s vibes but short on compelling content. I first gave the band a try because they were opening for Chvrches on their tour for Love Is Dead that year – which turned out to be a total mismatch in terms of the energy level of the two bands, despite my hopes that Lo Moon’s mostly sleepy studio material would come alive more on stage. It might have been tempting to say that the band only got the exposure they did because Chvrches’ frontwoman Lauren Mayberry was dating Lo Moon guitarist Sam Stewart – who, by the way, is the son of Eurythmics‘ Dave Stewart – but then it’s not really Sam’s band. Lead singer and primary songwriter Matt Lowell had the intention of putting together a band as a vehicle for the songs he was writing as far back as 2012, and Sam was the third member to come on board, after keyboardist and bassist Crisanta Baker. (And for what it’s worth, despite the heavy 80s influence, none of their music really sounds like anything I can recall Eurythmics ever doing.) As much as I may have thought a lot of their early material was bland aside from “Loveless”, I could see that they put a great amount of attention into their craft, almost to the point where recapturing the 80s sophisti-pop vibe became a bigger focus than, y’know, actually giving the songs memorable hooks and thoughtful lyrics that went beyond very generic themes of loss and longing. The Chvrches crowd at the show I went to was polite to them, but it didn’t seem like they were really winning a lot of people over (and if you’re from L.A. and you can’t get your own hometown hyped, then God help you elsewhere), and I assumed when I didn’t hear much from the band for years after that point that they were one and done. To their credit, when they resurfaced with their sophomore album A Modern Life in 2022, some of the kinks had been worked out – there was more up-tempo material, they had some much more memorable anthems including the soaring lead single “Dream Never Dies”, and they even threw in a few experimental moments that caught me off guard, most notably “Raincoats”, whose ambient opening verses colliding with an extremely noisy breakdown midway through. Still, they came up short in terms of delivering a cohesive album, so I didn’t exactly have high hopes that the third time would be the charm.
But that third album, somewhat ironically titled I Wish You Way More than Luck, actually turned out to be the moment where I found myself saying with utter sincerity: “Wow, these guys are actually pretty good.” Not amazing, mind you – there are still moments where I think Lowell, while he’s fine as smooth crooners of keyboard-heavy pop songs go, isn’t a terribly distinctive frontman, but the songwriting is starting to show more personality, and the way they shape their 80s influences into their own unique thing is starting to become more of an asset than just a bit of window dressing. Bringing on touring drummer Sterling Laws as a full-time member seems to have helped – there are several moments across this album where the rhythms – whether live or programmed – just seem bigger and more memorable. Lowell and Baker, for their part, build off of the momentum from A Modern Life‘s better material by pretty consistently coming up with solid piano/keyboard parts that give the songs melodic heft, and occasionally there are even driving guitar parts that push the band directly into “rock” territory when previously I’d have been hesitant to refer to them as anything but a pop band. You’ll spot the obvious 80s influence rather easily in a lot of cases, though I think they land more on the side of “inspired by” than “ripped off from” – they make the nostalgic vibe work this time around due to the lyrics (which I’m gradually realizing are quite good at sticking to a central theme/story throughout) focusing more on the concept of youth and innocence, what it means to grow up and feel like those aspects of your identity are fading, and coming to terms with the idea that you can learn from the past but you can’t go back and live in it. I’ll admit that, as a fairly recent 80s music convert, I can be suckered in quite easily by a lot of bands who nail the overall aesthetic. But it feels cheap when it’s used for plain old escapism. Lo Moon finds interesting ways to push those boundaries across this album, giving it a lot of replay value and making it one of the more compelling releases of 2024 thus far. Whether this band is capable of true art pop greatness, only time will tell – maybe they just got lucky this time around, but I’d like to think that their skills and creative instinct have developed over the years and that they’re on an upward trajectory that oughta make record #4 pretty great.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Borrowed Hills
The very quiet, carefully sculpted ambient opening of this track might led you to expect something different than what you end up getting when the big, booming drum loop kicks in. It’s a more assertive way for Lo Moon to lead off a record, easily besting “This Is It” and “Carried Away”, their past efforts in this department. I don’t want to set expectations too high by comparing the overall vibe to Tears for Fears, especially such an iconic song as “Shout” – but that was what initially came to mind. It’s not as emotionally heavy and industrially forceful as that classic 80s tune, but I think there’s some common DNA there. Just about everything contributed by the band works wonders here – the piano, keyboards, and little glowy bits of synth sparkle beautifully, the electric guitar adds a dose of melancholy longing with its restrained solo near the end, and the smooth tradeoff between Matt Lowell’s lead and what a female backing vocal really drives home his fear of stagnating in a small town far away from someone he loves. The setting here appears to be that he’s returned to a place he knew in his youth – with the so-called “borrowed hills” representing a place he felt like the king of as a teenager, but now they deem desolate and distant from everything really important in his life, stressing that he really can’t go home again and have it feel just like old times. While his lyrics can be cryptic, I love the imagery in lines like “Soaking in the pine groves, sail right past the marigold moon”. The chorus seems to reflect upon, and perhaps validate, his reason to leave: “Boys of the order, poison the water/They laugh as they drown/I need to get out of this town.” He feels like if he stayed, he’d be no better off than his peers who seem to have never fully grown up, who are still stuck in their addictions and in wondering why their pie-in-the-sky dreams won’t just fall into their laps. The tragedy unfolds with surprising elegant as the band downshifts into the tender bridge and then brings the drum loop and the chorus back in grand style for the climax. It’s just darn good songcraft.
Grade: A
2. Waiting a Lifetime
These first two songs are definitely meant to be connected – the distorted guitar fading out at the end of the previous track bleeds into the looming intro of this song, and both mention pine trees and contain the phrase “borrowed hills”. This is easily one of Lo Moon’s meatiest performances – I love how Crisanta Baker’s thick bassline melts into Sam Stewart’s low, buzzing rhythm guitar, with a very clean keyboard melody ringing out above it all, reminding me of a similar track U2 pulled on “New Year’s Day”. (And once again I’m comparing this song to a real heavy-hitter from back in the day – it’s risky to evoke such a memory in an 80s music fan when you’re not going quite that hard, but both the memory and the different direction they decide to take it in are intriguing enough that I don’t mind one bit. This one seems to look out on the small-town landscape and its forested surroundings after dark, with Lowell symbolically perched atop a steeple of one of the town’s old churches, thinking back to what sounds like a religious upbringing that he’s grown distant from in the years since. A part of him seems to want to reconnect with it – the bridge strikes one hell of an emotional chord when he claims “We’re infinitely transient/And reaching out for God to fill the void” – but the struggle with doubt and with all the burdens of adulthood seems to make the chasm too wide for him to cross. The title of this track only ever occurs as a backing vocal (I assume, but haven’t confirmed, that it’s Crisanta on BGV’s since she’s the only woman in the band), and it makes for a nice counterpoint with Matt’s invitation just to take a reflective walk through the woods and trying to make sense of this crisis of faith.
Grade: A+
3. Connecticut
We’re now three for three on songs that build up to huge climaxes in distinctive ways – Lo Moon is on a tear so far on this album, and it genuinely took me by surprise, considering how rare it’s been up to this point for me to hear even two tracks in a row from them that truly got me amped up. A voice from Lowell’s past comes into focus here, and it turns out to be his father, a man who (according to this narrative, at least) seemed to be rather hard and pessimistic, telling the family they’ve run out of water and it’s a sign that hope is lost. The demon he’s battling here seems to be the implication that he’s just like his dad and will never escape the tendency to look at life through a negative lens. It’s also probably no mistake to have a song that focuses so strongly on a father’s voice following a song about wanting God’s voice to say something in the silence – a lot of our views of God, especially since traditional Christian teachings tend to focus on a male God, are wrapped up in our experiences of having human fathers, for better or for worse. Once again I’m impressed with the thick, fuzzy tone of the bass, the mixture of desperation and defiance in Lowell’s voice (where was all this personality on the last two albums?), and especially Sterling Laws’ drumming, which nicely switches up an already driving beat when we hit the song’s high point at the end of a rather noisy crescendo. It’s not quite as startling as “Raincoats” in the “noisy outburst” department, but only because it doesn’t have a quiet lead-in. Listen carefully and you might pick up on some horns and some unusual bass licks amidst all the layers of sound. By the end of this opening trilogy, it’s pretty clear why the writer of these songs needed to get as far across the country from his hometown as he could in order to start his life over, and clear his head from all these haunting memories that he’s now being forced to confront upon returning.
Grade: A
4. When the Kids Are Gone
The much mellower rhythm programming and the soft-as-a-feather keyboards and guitars at the beginning of this one had me assuming at first that this was where Lo Moon would start settling back into their old habits. The thing is, I don’t dislike this sound on principle – I just find that one track of it blending into another does them no favors, which was my main bone of contention with their first album. I think the band’s learned a few tricks to help them keep this sort of thing interesting – Sterling’s live drums gradually overtake the programming as the song gently glides towards its conclusion, and there’s also some sort of a horn or woodwind instrument fluttering about, coming more into focus in the dusky, smooth-jazz-y outro. I’m getting flashbacks to The Dream Academy here, which isn’t at all a bad thing. Now if you’re expecting the subject matter to be as smooth and elegant of a ride as the band’s performance here – well, buckle up, because this is where the glimpses into Lowell’s childhood hint at some harrowing details. He depicts himself as a sad, scared child, fleeing to his bedroom to hide from what sounds like the wrath of an angry parent, possibly even running away from home by the time the song is over (“the pines” are once again mentioned, this time as a place of refuge to spend the night). It’s heavily implied that these angry outbursts from someone who was charged with his care and protection as a child is part of the reason he can no longer believe the things he was taught to believe as a child. The only way any peace or healing can finally be achieved is “when the kids are gone” – which could either means that his parents only seemed happy after their children moved out, or else that the children themselves in this scenario are “gone” because they’re no longer young and innocent. It’s an immensely sad thought either way, communicated beautifully but heart-wrenchingly within this otherwise subtle performance.
Grade: B+
5. Water
The lead single from this project managed to catch me off guard twice! First, I was struck by how immediately upbeat it was, and by its unusual time signature, bounding along to a rhythm of 7/8 with a downright joyous keyboard refrain, punchy drums trying to trick you into thinking it’s a regular 4/4 until the band skips a beat, and a meaty bass line playing up the syncopation. Lo Moon hasn’t been this fun to listen to since… well, ever. Hearing it on the album surprised me again because it registers like a bolt out of the blue after really taking the time to appreciate all the pain and loss of innocence being expressed in the first four songs. Is this really a happier turn of events, or are they just screwing with my expectations? Well… the jury’s still out on that one. I feel like Lowell’s lyrics are more definitive here, in terms of declaring why he needed to say goodbye to the toxic environment he’s spent the last several songs describing, but he also seems to have a genuine wish that the people he’s leaving behind won’t just wallow in the same misery year after year. That’s where the album’s title comes in – “Goodbye, I wish you way more than luck.” It comes across as sincere – like he knows that believing in blind luck won’t do because it’s done these people no favors over the years, and he wants to wish them something stronger and more tangible than that. The lyrics make a few callbacks to earlier songs that of course weren’t apparent when I first heard the song as a single – “borrowed hills” comes up for a third time, and “infinitely transient” makes a reappearance as well, reinforcing this idea slowly dawning on me that maybe there’s a singular narrative slowly running throughout the entire record. Most potent is the pre-chorus – the only point in the song where the rhythm switches to a genuine 4/4 and it relaxes a bit before jumping back to its happy but off-kilter opening riff: “And I wonder what will become of us/In your arms I trust as the walls/Crumble into dust.” It’s like a declaration that his old beliefs may have fallen apart, but he’s found someone he can genuinely believe in.
Grade: A+
6. Day Old News
…And just like that, the newfound hope that I thought had been expressed in “Water” seems to dissipate. The light drumming and interesting use of slide guitar in this song keep the pace rather brisk, and it’s an unusual sound for Lo Moon overall. But listen to the lyrics and there’s no mistaking it – a gloomy shade of dark gray has settled in, blocking the bright blue sky that we only briefly got a glimpse of. “Borrowed Hills” had promised a reunion “under iron skies”, and now they seem to meet again in the worst way possible – he’s just received the news of this person’s death, and presumably he’s dressed up in gray for the funeral. Maybe that’s what brought him back to this God-forsaken place to begin with? Or maybe the timing was just especially cruel – he hopes to see an old flame while he’s there for some other reason, they die unexpectedly mere hours before his arrival, and now the one good thing about that place in his mind is gone for good. This is some intriguing songwriting, but damn, is it depressing, too.
Grade: B
7. Mary in the Woods
OK, I mentioned The Dream Academy earlier, but now I swear I’m hearing a French horn. That can’t be an accident… right? Again, it’s not a bad reference to make, as slightly deeper cuts from the long list of nostalgia 80s bands are concerned. It helps to add a bit of a texture to a song that is otherwise a bit stubborn about taking its time to get going, with a rather leaden drum loop leading it off that, much like “When the Kids Are Gone”, gets better with the assistance of Sterling’s live drumming in the second half. Lowell’s got a reasonably melancholy minor-key melody here that could perhaps benefit from the notes not being spaced out so much by the excessively slow tempo – though I feel like the band speeds it up a hair around when the live drums come in. The way his voice gently caresses each note reminds me that he’s improved as a vocalist – I feel like this is the sort of effect he was always going for, but on a lot of their early stuff, it came across more as a disinterested yawn. Here, I can tell it’s meant as gentle mourning. His vision of meeting up with his lover in the woods is one more aspect of his past that he has to let go of as he paces the aisles of the empty church, presumably after her funeral has concluded, reminding himself that she set him free from a lot of the doubts and fears he was wrestling with and he’s grateful for that, but he also seems acutely aware that “we’ll soon be gone” – that life is fleeting and it could be over for any one of us in a flash. No easy answers here – just a man’s thoughts (and possibly prayers?) offered up in a moment of restrained grief.
Grade: B-
8. Evidence
This six and a half-minute slow-burner – the longest track they’ve put out since “Loveless” – seemed to have a lot working against it at first. Just hearing the slow intro and not knowing what I was in for, my honest first thought was that it had an incredibly dull, slow drum beat, nothing really going on in the instrumental department, and the quiet, reflective atmosphere was almost immediately undone by Lowell dropping the inelegant line “What a fuckin’ mess we find ourselves in.” This reminded me of him dropping the old f-bomb right at the beginning of “Eyes on the Prize” on A Modern Life, and it didn’t bode well for what turned out to be a rather bland and pretentious song. “Evidence”, on the other hand, knows what it’s doing – specifically, what it’s depriving us of now so that it can pay off the long wait for it later. It actually might be their most masterfully executed climax, in terms of how languid and defeated the song seems at first, only to speed things up considerably midway through – the drums steadily build with the force of an oncoming freight train, there’s this little keyboard riff ringing out that sounds sort of like a harpsichord, and the phrases “As foolish as it was” (from earlier in the song) and “Remember, I wish you way more than luck” (referencing the chorus of “Water”) are recontextualized in this increasingly hectic maelstrom of sound, that I find almost impossible to resist grooving along to. Even before the song gets to “the good part”, there’s a lot here that seems to recontextualize ideas from earlier in the album. That off-putting line I mentioned earlier is followed by “If drowning was my first offense/Well, here I go again” – a hint that he’s become one of those poisonous boys he despised in “Borrowed Hills”. The third verse might be where his regrets are spelled out most plainly: “As foolish as I was/There’s something I regret/Leaving you cold as ice/In Connecticut/In the name of diligence/I found out where you went/Surrendered to thе promise/That I won’t be him again.” The need to not become his father is what drove him away, but now he fears that leaving behind the lover he promised to meet up with again is what ultimately drove her to her untimely end. The song serves as the emotional crescendo of the entire album – it’s a moment where he accepts responsibility for the choices he made, asks forgiveness of someone he abandoned in a time of need, and tries to muster up the courage to believe she’s in a better place.
Grade: A-
9. The Chapel
This minute-long interlude could be generously described as an “instrumental” – it starts off with some dissonant strings and other weird, feeedback-y sounds bleeding out of “Evidence”, and then for most of its run, you can just barely hear bits of piano and chattering in the background. It’s meant as connecting tissue between the last few songs, and I assume it’s meant to evoke the feeling of being there in the aftermath of the funeral, surrounded by well-wishers yet also feeling incredibly distant from all of them. It’s not a particularly interesting piece to listen to, and since this takes up one track out of only ten, I can’t help but feel a little bit shortchanged on content – it’s not as bad as the two interludes that left A Modern Life with only eight songs to work with, but still, this isn’t an artistic mode in which Lo Moon manages to communicate much of anything beyond what the actual songs do.
Grade: N/A
10. Honest
Speaking of modes in which I don’t think Lo Moon is all that effective, a solo piano ballad doesn’t seem like the right move at the end of this record. (There are some faint strings, but not enough to really matter.) I guess sort of get it – we’ve gone through numerous songs that were basically controlled explosions of emotion, now Lowell felt maybe it would be more appropriate to subvert that expectation and just give us a quiet reflection to close the album with. But the melody and the rather basic chords here don’t do a whole lot for me – there’s a brief moment where the melody builds in the chorus and I think it might arrive at a more beautiful payoff, but then it meekly backs away, and the record closes with a bit of a whimper. This feels like a regression in the story, too – he’s already apologized for leaving this other person behind, and now it seems like he’s doubling back to his reasons for living, telling himself he wouldn’t have been able to be the man she really wanted him to be anyway. It’s his honest take on why their relationship needed to end, but it kind of feels like sour grapes, like he’s predicting the future of a path not taken just to help himself sleep better at the end of the day. A few of the closing lines really get to me, making me wonder if the real tragedy is that he never truly learned his lesson: “I can drive you home, we can dance alone/But I might not be everything you think I should b/We can stay late on the phone/Laugh till we’re old/But I might not be everything you think I should be.” I don’t know man, doing that stuff together even if you can’t be everything for her still sounds like a way better outcome than the one she got. Whether all of this is a fictional narrative or a reflective of very real and painful events in Lowell’s life, I can’t say. I can only judge the story based on the details given. And when the last chapter of the story starts to turn you against the narrator after he managed to get you on his side for most of it, that’s either sloppy writing or one hell of a devious last-minute twist. Either way, this final chapter deserved a more climactic song.
Grade: C+
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Borrowed Hills $1.75
Waiting a Lifetime $2
Connecticut $1.75
When the Kids Are Gone $1.25
Water $2
Day Old News $1
Mary in the Woods $.75
Evidence $1.50
The Chapel $0
Honest $.50
TOTAL: $12.50
BAND MEMBERS:
Matt Lowell: Lead vocals, guitars, keyboards
Crisanta Baker: Keyboards, bass
Samuel Stewart: Guitars
Sterling Laws: Drums
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
http://lomoonofficial.com/
https://www.facebook.com/lomoon/
murlough23 
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